MK Art Gallery Workshop

We visited the MK Art Gallery today for a workshop on the artwork by Melanie Smith who is currently exhibiting work there. On the way to the art gallery the kids played around the various pieces of art and sculptures that we came across. MK is great for this I think, there are lots of interesting pieces all over the centre that they love playing on and talking about. The one below usually has water in it that flows down and I believe it is meant to represent the path of the River Ouzel through MK. 

We had a little wait outside the gallery so they played with friends, chasing and running about. 

In the gallery they were encouraged to think about why they might be immersed in colour and they paid attention to the sounds coming from the speakers that intentionally accompanied the light. 

They watched a short piece of art film about Mexico City and saw how the film was taken from a helicopter that spiralled further and further away. Caden liked this bit, especially when the woman running the workshop held up a world map. We have done work on Geography lately and he loves learning where countries are in relation to each other. He pointed out in the group that it was alongside the North Atlantic Ocean (he read it from the map though). 

There was an interesting exhibition to accompany the short film with many display cases filled with very unusual pieces like a green plastic brain, forests, thumbs, vases and so on. I had to write down the words of things they had found and Miles, Caden and Megan ran off excitedly and came back to tell me what they had seen in the cases so I could write down as many as possible.

Then they sat down and looked at all the orange items on the display. They shouted out what the items were and enjoyed participating in the group. Then they pointed out that these in fact were all made of plastic and this was man made. A group discussion about what constituted man-made and what was natural in materials followed. 

This is the group of children finding similarities in the items they had written down. All those that occur on all three groups' sheets are ticked off. The children had to read each others' sheets and shout out when they found a matching set.

We also watched two films in a dark room which showed us all about the Fordlandia project. This was a purpose built town which was placed in the middle of the Amazon rainforest. The jungle quickly took over, people got diseases and nature effectively won. This was the premise for much of the artists work and the kids were interested to see the films that showed how the trees had grown back into the buildings which were abandoned now. 

After this rather excellent session we said goodbye to our friends (we know all the children from various other groups/classes we have attended), we went for our picnic. I remembered from a cycle ride the other day about a new sculpture in Campbell Park that the kids liked so we walked over there. The kids are here playing in between the posts. 

Caden wanted to roll down the hill so I took our packed lunch to the hill and drank my coffee while they had a great time rolling down and running back up again. 

Some beautiful flowers we found. 

Caden squelched his socked feet about in a boggy bit of grass at the bottom of the hill so when he came back up that time he wanted to take off his socks. He then found a rather creative way of wearing his socks... tied in knots around his feet. This amused him and he ran about for a while with them like this. haha!

Milesy rolling about and having fun!

The art gallery in MK is a brilliant resource as many of the exhibitions are free and incorporate lots of different aspects of learning. Today's session covered so much about art but also about Geography, science - materials, the environment and history, plus Caden was using his reading and writing skills in the session and learning how to observe differences and similarities in groups of objects.